Is Google+ Really So Male Dominated?

Over the past few days, several websites have been running stories about a bunch of statistics which indicate that Google+ has become a male dominated social networking platform, but new stats provided by FamilyLink and Ancestry.com’s Paul Allen paint a completely different picture.

Socialstatistics.com claims that 87 per cent of Google+ users are male while only 12 per cent are female. Similarly, findpeopleonplus.com suggests that out of the first 948,000 profiles they scanned, 74.9 per cent were male while 25.1 were female.

Paul Allen published his own Google+ gender stats on his Google+ page. According to his surname based random sampling technique, in the beginning of July, there were 77 per cent male and 23 per cent female Google + users.

When the user base almost doubled a few days later, the stats stood at around 68.4 per cent male and 31.6 per cent female. A week later, the stats had tipped to 66.4 per cent male and 33.6 per cent female, which suggests that the male-female divide was being over exaggerated by everyone.

“For comparison sake, LinkedIn, which is a business social network with more than 100 million users is still 63% Male and 37% Female according to Pew,” Allen said.

“Google+'s female population percentage will likely surpass LinkedIn's in early August. The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being,” he added.